Amanda M. Castro is a Network TV writer at Collider and a New York–based journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, where she is an Associate Editor, and The U.S. Sun, where she previously served as a Senior Consumer Reporter.
She specializes in network television coverage, delivering sharp, thoughtful analysis of long-running procedural hits and ambitious new dramas across broadcast TV. At Collider, Amanda explores character arcs, storytelling trends, and the cultural impact of network series that keep audiences tuning in week after week.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Amanda is bilingual and holds a degree in Communication, Film, and Media Studies from the University of New Haven.
There are sitcoms you throw on for background noise, and then there’s Hacks — a show that somehow gets sharper, sadder, and funnier every time you come back to it. What starts as a biting comedy about a washed-up Vegas legend and an unemployed millennial writer slowly turns into one of television’s most layered character studies. Everything lands on a rewatch of this show, but the real surprise is how much emotional groundwork the series hides underneath it all.
Its fifth and final season earned 24 Emmy nominations, setting a new record for the most nominations received by a comedy series in a single season. That history-making recognition only adds to the appeal of revisiting the details that made Hacks so special. By now, most people know the setup. Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) is an old-school comedy icon trying to stay relevant before the industry quietly pushes her aside. Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) is a young writer with talent, bad instincts, and a career derailed by one stupid tweet. Forced together out of professional desperation, the two spend the first season circling each other like trapped animals. Deborah thinks Ava is entitled, while Ava thinks Deborah is emotionally constipated. They’re both right.
‘Hacks’ Understands That Funny People Are Often Miserable
A lesser show would have turned Deborah and Ava into a standard odd-couple pairing within a few episodes, and thankfully, Hacks resists that temptation. The series lets them hurt each other — sometimes intentionally, sometimes casually, and often in ways that feel a little too recognizable.
Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely
different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you
would be having within a week.
You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts
works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war
so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting
you.
- You are drawn to belonging, which is why this fandom sorted itself into houses within
about five minutes and has never stopped. - This is the most social of the four, and the one most likely to know which type every
single person in your life would be. - The books are built to be reread rather than analysed, and rereading is exactly what you
do with things you love. - The new HBO series is bringing the whole thing back one book at a time, which means the
arguments are about to start all over again.
You belong to the deepest fandom on this list, the one where
somebody has always read further than you and is quietly delighted to say so. Middle-earth
rewards patience more than any other world in popular culture.
- You like the sense that the story you are reading is only the visible part of something
enormous, which is precisely how Tolkien built it. - This fandom takes adaptation seriously to a degree that other fandoms find slightly
alarming, and it has good reasons for that. - Your favourite thing about the books is probably the bit that is not action at all,
which is the walking, the songs and the long goodbyes. - Nobody here thinks heroism belongs to the powerful, and the whole story exists to make
that argument.
You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one
where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of
it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.
- You want something you can share with absolutely everybody, from a six year old to a
grandparent, and this is the only one on the list that really does that. - Nobody argues like Star Wars fans argue, and the argument has been running since roughly
1980 with no sign of resolution. - The pull here is sensory before it is narrative, since it is the sound design, the score
and the look of a used and dented galaxy. - You would be first in the queue, in costume, with strong opinions and a genuinely good
time.
You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the
argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in
space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.
- You are an optimist in a way that is currently unfashionable, and this is the only major
franchise still willing to say the future might be better. - The best episodes are the ones where nobody fires anything, which is a sentence that
makes perfect sense to this fandom and to nobody else. - Starfleet Academy brought the franchise back to a classroom in 2026, which is
appropriate, because Trek has always been a bit of a seminar. - You would want the conversation afterwards more than the episode itself, and here you
will always find somebody willing to have it.
Deborah fears aging and becoming invisible, and Ava wants success and validation so badly that she sabotages herself in pursuit of it. Every season strips another layer off of both women until their ugliest instincts become impossible to ignore. Once you know where these characters end up, earlier scenes start carrying extra weight. Deborah’s cruelty is more like a survival instinct than ego, and Ava’s self-righteousness starts looking like panic disguised as confidence.
The show also trusts silence more than most comedies do. Some of the best moments in Hacks happen after the punchline lands: Deborah sitting alone in her mansion after a set, Ava realizing she pushed too far, and Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) quietly burning out while keeping Deborah’s empire running. The series understands that comedians perform for a living, even when no one is technically on stage.
Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder Have One of TV’s Best Dynamics
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Image via HBO</figure>
Smart deserves every award this show has handed her. Her fifth consecutive Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy for Hacks underlined how consistently she brought Deborah to life. Deborah Vance could have easily become a caricature — a one-note diva firing off insults in expensive caftans — and Smart refuses to let that happen. She plays Deborah like someone who built herself from scratch and never once got to relax afterward.
Then there’s Einbinder, who had the impossible task of keeping up with her. Ava could’ve been unbearable in the wrong hands; instead, Einbinder makes her frustrating in deeply human ways. She’s impulsive, defensive, insecure, occasionally selfish, and constantly trying to prove she belongs in rooms that barely tolerate her.
The brilliance of Hacks is that it never fully settles on what Deborah and Ava are to each other. Friends feel too simple, and a mentor-mentee relationship doesn’t fully capture it either. They fight like family, compete like coworkers, and understand each other with an intimacy neither woman seems comfortable admitting out loud. By the later seasons, that push-and-pull becomes the entire engine of the series. Their Season 4 feud — kicked off after Ava blackmails Deborah for a head writer position — is brutal, partly because the show spent years earning it. Every insult lands because these women know exactly where to cut. And yet, Hacks never loses sight of how funny they are together. The series can pivot from emotional devastation to a perfectly timed throwaway joke without feeling manipulative. Few comedies manage tonal shifts this cleanly.
Every Season of ‘Hacks’ Finds a New Angle
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Image via HBO Max</figure>
Most comedies lose momentum because the characters stop evolving; however, Hacks avoids that trap by refusing to let Deborah and Ava stay comfortable. The final season surpassed the previous single-season comedy Emmy nomination record of 23, shared by The Bear and The Studio. Rather than feeling like a victory lap, those 24 nominations recognized a comedy that kept finding ways to evolve. The early seasons focus on stand-up and reinvention. Later seasons expand into late-night television, Hollywood politics, creative burnout, public image, and legacy. The show keeps widening its scope without losing the intimacy that made it work in the first place. Even side characters grow richer on rewatch. Marcus’ exhaustion becomes more noticeable. Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) and Kayla (Megan Stalter) evolve from comic relief into one of the show’s funniest partnerships, and Kaitlin Olson‘s D.J. slowly transforms from a chaotic supporting character into one of the series’ emotional anchors.
That payoff becomes especially clear in the final season, which pushes Deborah to confront the damage she’s caused — professionally, personally, and especially as a mother. One episode built around The Amazing Race sounds ridiculous on paper, but somehow, Hacks turns it into one of the season’s most emotionally satisfying hours. The series has always understood that spectacle only works if the character work underneath it is real. That’s ultimately why Hacks improves with every rewatch. The comedy gets you through the door, but the character detail is what keeps pulling you back. Every season adds new context to the last one, and every argument reveals something uglier and more honest underneath it. Very few comedies trust their audience enough to let characters stay complicated, but Hacks does.
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